November 30
The Red Cross has found that nothing has improved at Guantanamo despite the revelations of the past year. They came to this conclusion after visiting in June, which means they visited after the prisoner abuse scandals had already broken, and which also means Bush and his adminstration can't say they didn't know. It was their responsibility to stop it, and at least at this point they hadn't. At what point do they become culpable for war crimes? There is some point where they have advance knowledge of prisoner abuse, maybe not a specific instance but knowledge that it's going on, which makes it their responsibility to stop it. Even if it can be shown they knew nothing before it came out publicly --- a tough sell given the memos that have already been found --- there can be no doubt they knew afterward, and failure to try to stop it makes them culpable in what is legally a war crime.
November 29
A reason it's tough to get change in the House of Representatives is that even when voters know Congress is screwed up, they figure their own representative is OK. However, good honest republicans were bound to keep their arrogant leaders, and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is showing that partisanship is more important than legislation. His new rule is he won't allow a vote on anything that doesn't have the support of a majority of the majority, meaning that if most Republicans oppose a bill, even if enough Democrats favor it to pass it, even pass it easily, he won't allow a vote. This is new. Many bills have passed when the majority party split but the minority party supported it. This is a piece with the same arrogance that caused them to change their caucus rules against anyone holding a leadership position while under indictment. One consequence is that intelligence reform has been held up. Wouldn't one think that after the failure to stop 911, and getting everything wrong about Iraq, that reform might be a good idea? Or should we leave it to Porter Goss and his ideological purge?
Ukraine's regional courts are considering 11,000 complaints about how the election was run. So far, the Congressmen who asked the GAO to investigate our presidential election received 57,000 complaints. So Ukraine's results are bad but ours are OK?
November 28
More public hearings in Ohio have produced more evidence of problems and reason to suspect the election results. Some voters had to use the touchscreen machines with no paper records, and there were more instances of Kerry votes being changed to Bush. Attempts to get more machines for Democratic precincts were rebuffed by Republican officials. There were instances of Republican judges acting in secretive ways. There are many stories of voters having to leave due to long lines, and handicapped voters being stopped by lack of accessibility. There were also many instances of several precincts voting at the same location, leading to confusion about which line was which, and now the Republicans are throwing out the provisional ballots of people who waited several hours only to find themselves in the wrong line. Again, like has happened nationally, every problem in the election has benefitted Bush. In hope of remedying one problem, People for the American Way is suing to force Cuyahoga county to hand check rejected provisional ballots and against voter registration cards, not just computer records. The county has rejected a third of the ballots, much more than the statewide historical average and, of course, maybe enough to change the result.
In case someone thinks that Bush's win in the popular vote gives him legitimacy despite problems with the voting in Ohio and Florida, look at this list of problems in North Carolina. The point isn't that Kerry might somehow have won North Carolina, but when this many problems are found , there's always a question of how many didn't get found. It's hard to conceive that North Carolina's result could have been different, but consider that attention to election problems has focused first on Ohio and second on Florida, and almost not at all on the rest of the country. Whether Ohio reverses the electoral college or not, the problems with the touchscreens nationally put their results in doubt, and at 39,000,000 votes cast on them, they could account for Bush's margin and no one would ever know. There were long lines nationwide, but there's been no investigation of whether, like Ohio, the lines were predominately in Democratic precincts and attempts to resolve the problem were resisted by Republican officials. In either case, the popular vote looks like a toss up. That's not the thing to give Bush legitimacy.
In Iraq, confirmation, as if that was needed, of war profiteering by friends of the acting vice president: Halliburton can't account for a third of the government property it's responsible for.
But if conservatives can't see how Bush has left the treasury open to white collar looting, they maybe have finally realized that many people seriously dislike us. Fox News had a special called "Hating America", where they admitted many people, well, hate America. They're still in a bit of denial about the cause though. They believe it's just that we do so poorly in propaganda, and people in Europe and the Middle East are believing a lot of lies. There are some lies running around certainly, but the next step for Fox is to realize that many people hate us because they know the truth. Fox characterized the state department's Arabic language TV station as "fair and balanced". Gee, where have we heard that phrase before? The next step on the road to realty for American conservatives is to realize our actions are the problem, not our propaganda.
November 27
I wonder if this came from the same ignorant fools who stuck "crusade" into Bush's speech about going off to war in a Muslim country, and named the invasion of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (OIL -- not that the war had anything to do with that). The offensive begun in Iraq Tuesday has been named "Operation Plymouth Rock". Maybe the Iraqis have no idea what "Plymouth Rock" means. If they do, they might see it less the white way and more the Indian way, as an invasion by whites intent on taking the natives' resources and leading to death on a massive scale for the invaded. And to think that these dimwits in the Bush adminstration can't figure out why so many people hate America, if they've even figured out that many do.
Speaking of "Operation Iraqi Liberation", folk singer David Rovics, who has a song by that title, was recently pulled off an airplane for wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt after a complaint by someone shouting, "Bush is a man of God!". Yes, the guy with the shirt was the one pulled off the plane, not the one shouting, though Rovics says he got a free ticket out of it. I don't recommend wearing anti-Bush clothing as a way to a ticket however. Bring your credit card.
Getting back to Iraq, maybe the interim government has more brains than those who created it. They're going to meet with insurgents. Such a move would seem inevitable as each side realizes it can't win. The insurgents can disrupt Iraq indefinitely, and the U.S. is too big to be pushed out if it doesn't want to go. The interim government probably realizes that if left on its own, it's life would be short, so best to act while the Americans are still there. The article indicates the government is meeting with Baathists. Divide and conquer perhaps? The Baathists aren't Al Qaida, even if the Bushies still can't tell the difference, and they were enemies when Saddam ruled, so they're not natural allies now. We don't know how many insurgent groups there are, so presumably they have different ideologies and strategies. Maybe some have realized that the beheadings stain all of them, not just Zarqawi, and stiffen support for the U.S. and interim government. Let's hope the rest figure out that car bombing civilians doesn't help either.
Someone who has been following my ongoing criticism of Bush's lies and incompetence may find it odd I didn't call for the troops to come home. It's the same reason Kerry's refusal to call for withdrawal didn't diminish the ardor of his supporters. That's because believe it or not, the situation could get worse. If we suddenly withdrew, the country would remain in chaos. The interim government wouldn't last long, and even if the elections come off, the elected government will be seen as illegitimate by many Iraqis and won't last without American soldiers protecting it. Then all sorts of bad things are possible. The nightmare scenario is a general civil war breaks out between Sunnis and Shiites, with each side drawing support from the neighbors, leading to direct intervention by Iran on the Shiite side and Arab countries on the Sunni side. Less awful scenarios include a Shiite dictatorship which would be a theocracy on an Iranian model. The country could split into Shiite and Sunni states, if they could agree to a split, again almost surely with both run by Muslim fundamentalists. Both sides could have their own civil wars once power is up for grabs, with the Sunni insurgents turning on each other over fine points of ideology, theology, and personal loyalty to leaders, while someone among the Shiites would form a militia to oppose the Al Mehdi army that has so far composed the armed Shiite resistance to the U.S. The Kurds already have effective autonomy, and are held back from independence by the Turkish threat to invade to prevent an independent Kurdish state as well as American opposition to independence. They might have no choice however if the alternative is invasion by either Sunnis or Shiites, either Baathists or Muslim fundamentalists. To complicate things, if a Kurdish state is the threat Turkey believes, there could be another separatist war in Turkey which has already fought a long war with its Kurdish minority, and there are Kurdish minorities in Syria and Iran.
Of course, if we stay, as appears certain, the dribble of American casualties will continue, our treasury will continue to drain, our armed forces will be tied up thereby presenting opportunities for mischief for bad guys outside Iraq, we will continue to be hated for the death and destruction that has resulted from the invasion, and there's hardly a guarantee of avoiding some awful outcome. Bush made the mess and ought to clean it up, and the best chance of that is to somehow create a viable government. Maybe we'll have to realize that Iraq isn't a country, but three countries stuck together, and we'll go with a three state solution. That's not a good choice obviously, but there are no good choices, and that's the big thing about all this. Bush's lies to get us into this useless war and incompetence in running it put us in a situation where all choices are bad. If there is a silver lining, it will be that the American public and media get a lot more skeptical when the war drums are beat. Maybe the grassroots liberals that have organized around their opposition to Bush and the war will stay that way and be a powerful political force, leading to a resurgent liberalism just like in the dark days of the depression.
It will be interesting the next few years.
November 26
If anyone thought the GOP word twisting would stop with their alleged election win, they were wrong. Twisting the admission of everyone questioning the election results in Ohio that the recount probably won't change the results, state Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett said, "These groups have already acknowledged the outcome of the election will not change, and their actions represent a foolish attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency." No one has acknowledged this. It's not the same thing at all. If a recount produces the same result, then Bush's legitimacy is stengthened, not weakened. It's not foolish to cast doubt on Bush's legitimacy if he's illegitimate. What really undermines the acting president's legitimacy is the refusal of himself and his party to address the causes of the doubt. Instead, they impede investigations like they impeded reforms before the election. That's what causes suspicion. Look boys, if you want to save your boy W from charges of illegitimacy, stop trying to stop the recount in Ohio, stop interfering with efforts to investigate Florida, stop pretending you don't know who does the dirty tricks, stop posting challengers at polling places, and stop fighting efforts to make voting systems auditable. On the positive side, if the GOP is so worried, maybe they have good reason.
In that same article, the decision of Warren county to close the vote counting on the grounds of a security warning from th FBI that the FBI says it never gave is casting doubt on the accuracy of some results. In Cuyahoga county, the Democratic core, provisional ballots are being disallowed at a rate of one third, far above the historical average for the state of 12%. The reason is usually lack of registration or voting at the wrong precinct. The accusation of the latter voters is they were too lazy to wait in line at the proper precinct. If true, and who could know, doesn't such grotesque differences in waits just confirm there was a serious problem in how this election was conducted? There are charges some judges told voters they could vote in the wrong precinct. There were complaints that the slow pace of processing registrations meant some people didn't get the information about which polling place was theirs. Is it possible some properly registered voters weren't on the rolls yet, so are election officials checking against an updated list? Most absurd, this is exactly the sort of problem provisional ballots were supposed to address. Instead, some unknown number voters are being disenfranchised because they received misinformation. The Ohio election is expected to be so close after the provisional ballots and uncounted punchcards are counted, that just a few thousand disenfranchised voters might have decided the election.
Assuming Ohio doesn't surprise us with a Kerry electoral college victory, there's still impeachment, which is tough to see happening with a GOP congress that won't investigate their appointed president. If we could get past that problem, we'd still need definitive proof of criminal activity. The best hope for that might be the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. The only certainty is someone in the White House exposed the identity of an undercover CIA agent after her husband went public with information that the administration knew some of the evidence it used to justify the invasion of Iraq was forged. I find it impossible to believe Bush doesn't know who leaked unless he's willfully ignorant. There's no indication that he ordered it, but refusing to investigate might be bad enough, and covering up would definitely be bad enough. That's what got Nixon. I've been wondering where the special prosecutor's investigation sits, and the Washington Post provided the answer today. Investigators are trying to put the events in order. Leaking after Robert Novak, columnist, pundit, and dishonest hack, first exposed Plame's identity could be taken as just spin. It looks like several people might have leaked, which would make this a coordinated smear campaign aimed both at undercutting Joseph Wilson's (Plame's husband) credibility and at sending the message that if you expose what you know about Bush, your family will be placed in danger.
November 24
Keith Olbermann had pollster John Zogby on his show last night, and commented on the interview and on email he received from Warren Mitofsky, who heads one of the firms that conducted the exit polls. They disagreed about the accuracy of the exit polls. Mitofsky defends their accuracy, while Zogby things they were wrong, but the problem is probably with the polling method.
At least the story is starting to get picked up by other mainstream media. Aaron Brown had a brief segment on it, and even included Bev Harris, though he gave her only a sound bite.
The Daytona Beach News Journal, in an editorial Monday, realized there appears to be a problem with the county's vote counting again and called for a recount to clear it up.
November 23
I've mentioned before that Keith Olbermann has been following the election fraud story like no one else in the mainstream media. His November 21 blog entry is interesting reading. Apparently I'm not the only one to notice that the Caltech study of exit polls used numbers fixed to represent the tallies, and other academics figure their figures just don't figure. The conservative counter response to the liberal grassroots is to tell us the election is over, get over it. They have no answer to the problems, so they just wish we'd stop looking. Fat chance. Olbermann also mentioned that the range of 130,000 - 260,000 votes in the Berkeley study was because they can't tell whether 130,000 votes were added to Bush's total, or switched from Kerry's, which brings Bush's margin down to 220,000 or 90,000. Add in the people turned away by the six hour waits to vote, including for early voting, the undiscovered amounts of fraud like in Volusia county, uncounted absentee votes Olbermann mentioned the number of which statewide can't be known, and Florida is probably as close as it was in 2000. Of course, the big thing is the touchscreens, which allow no recount, but if investigators could get a look, the detection of tampering is possible.
I can just imagine Democratic leaders who made the quick decision to concede the election looking at Ukraine and saying, "See, that's the kind of turmoil we would have had in this country if we screamed about fraud instead of accepting the election result, and we wouldn't win, so what choice was there?" What's going on in Ukraine is the opposition is refusing to accept a stolen election (scroll to "Ukraine Election Fallout Continues Amid Protests"). The same theft occurred in earlier elections, so Russia and the Ukrainian government figured the people would realize there was nothing they could do and accept the result. They were wrong. The people have taken to the streets outside government buildings determined to remove an illegitimate government. No, of course I don't want that here. I'd rather not have to storm the Capitol or White House to throw out a government. I'd like to think I'm willing to do that if that's what it takes, but I won't mind leaving that untested. However, I also wonder if that's what it will eventually take to remove an American government if fraud is tolerated. It's worse in Ukraine than here to be sure, but it's worse here now than in the 2000 election we found so shocking. Maybe it's not a trend and won't get worse, or maybe a fraudulent result assented to will breed more of it. We don't know, but we'll find out if we don't raise as big a ruckus as it takes to expose whatever occurred this time. Letting Bush get away with election theft now, and letting his party continue to do this indefinitely, is too big a price to pay to avoid turmoil in our politics or our streets. So I urge the Democratic leadership to follow the lead of the grassroots on this one, and see the example of Ukraine, and do whatever it takes to stop the fraud now. Even if Bush won, every bit of fraud must be exposed and where possible prosecuted. So what if we're called sore losers, and so what if conservatives want to blame the messengers rather than the thieves? So what if that makes the red blue divide even sharper? Better that than assenting to the subversion of American democracy. The Ukrainians aren't just shaming Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian government, they're shaming us too.
November 22
I wish this was the Canadian government considering a real action rather than one columnist who'd like to see Bush arrested for war crimes when he goes to Canada, but at least Thomas Walkom agrees with me that what Bush has done might be prosecutable. Perhaps the acting president and some of his lieutenants who broke international law in Iraq will join Henry Kissinger in having to be careful where they travel for fear of arrest and indictment. They pretended they didn't know anything until abuse at Abu Ghraib came out in the news, but they not only made the decision to invade on false pretenses and disregard the Geneva conventions, they were warned the abuse was going on before photos brought it to public attention.
At long last, the Democratic party will join the fight in Ohio by joining the effort to get a recount. Maybe the willingness of the Democrats to get into this will get more of the mainstream media to pay attention.
Also in Ohio, Common Cause had reports of polls closing as late as 3 AM. The president of Common Cause, Shelly Pingree, pointed out that the long lines are effectively a poll tax since voters have to lose work time when the wait is so long, and that stops people voting when they can't afford to miss that income or who risk being fired. Interestingly, she also said that the news media were setting up lots of interviews on election day and the day after until Kerry conceded, when they dropped the story.
So why is it that exit polls can be the basis for the administration denouncing the election result in Ukraine as fraudulent, but not here? The exit polls had the opposite result of the tallies in both countries, and international observers had substantial criticisms, yet the Bush campaign has the media convinced the fault lies in the polling, not in the vote counting.
November 21
A public hearing on election problems in Ohio produced testimony of lines longer in Democratic precincts, of inner city precincts having fewer machines than in the primary, intimidation by people working for the secretary of state, and people leaving long lines because employers wouldn't let them stay. A challenge to the election results will be filed with the Ohio Supreme Court.
Though there's no way to determine the result if a touchscreen machine was tampered with, but tampering might be detectable, if it were possible to get the access to look. So far, the message from manufacturers and the courts is access denied. Well, it's not like there's any concern the election was stolen. I mean that sarcastically for those new to election fraud. In one incident in California, vote counting was halted while an employee of Sequoia Voting Systems had access to a machine, and 300 paper ballots were missed during the first count, yet no access was allowed to the audit logs.
In Florida, this year's other Florida though with less attention than Ohio, Jenny Nash, press secretary for the secretary of state said, "We have never had any reports from supervisors of machines malfunctioning or of votes being lost." However, Susan Van Houten of Palm Beach Coalition for Election Reform said, "I think that's a joke. As a poll worker in the primary (election), I personally witnessed three machines go down." On Nov. 2, 40 of 798 machines were unable to print a tally tape, which is posted at the precinct and presumably could be a check that the tally wasn't changed later, as appears to have happened elsewhere in Florida. Combined with the many reports of Kerry votes being changed to Bush votes, and the long lines at polling places, one has to wonder if Florida wouldn't get a more accurate result with a coin flip.
Though Minnesota's election seemed to run mostly smoothly, the new and probably unconstitutional press restrictions did cause problems for at least a couple reporters. Though the smooth election was as much despite the secretary of state of because of her, someone in her office gloated on the City Pages blog on election night (why Republicans gloat over an election won at least in part by fraud is beyond me, but anyway). They tried to be anonymous, but didn't know their location showed up. City Pages looked to see if the ID was used anywhere else, and found someone on Amazon with the same ID posting messages from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint. old_metalhed from St. Paul and old_metalhed from the secretary of state's office might be two different people, so we look to see if there Mary Kiffmeyer has any fundamentalists in her office, and what do you know, there is: Mary herself. Disagreeing with a core principle of American government, she said the most destructive words in American life are "Separation of church and state." This is the woman running our elections. Please Mary, take the red pill.
November 20
The good news from the hard campaign and the fight over election fraud is that the grassroots are ready to keep fighting. The bad news is the Democratic leadership is still seeking the instruction manual for their backbones. The case in point is the apparent decision not to fight the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Maybe they want to hold their fire until a Supreme Court justice is nominated, or maybe they dread the ramifications of opposing the first Hispanic attorney general. They ought to dread the ramifications of an attorney general who wrote the memo justifying torture, calling the Geneva conventions "obsolete". If that's not enough, how about an attorney general who was responsible for helping Governor W. review death penalty, and consistently left out the defendant's side, like exculpatory evidence. Both show an utter disregard for justice, and not only does the second disgust the civilized world, but the first may get Gonzales charged with war crimes if ever the Bush administration can be held accountable. Think about diplomacy until that day. The prisoner abuse scandals have damaged our reputation severely, and Bush is nominating the author of the memo that says torture is ok? Guess how that looks.
Maybe the thinking is that if he becomes attorney general, we won't have to worry about him being nominated for the Supreme Court. Nonsense. There's no prohibition on the attorney general becoming a justice, and if he gets easy approval for one, the case for rejecting for the other gets very weak, not to mention that he'll have a better resume if he does get a court nomination. This may be the one guy among all the nominations Bush will make for any posts that we want to fight.
November 19
Blackboxvoting.org may have found substantial evidence of election fraud in Florida. There is an account of it on their home page, and they gave interviews to Thom Hartmann. The crux of the story is they went to the Volusia County Elections Office to see requested poll tapes, which are the printouts of the tallies from optical scan machines. They were given unsigned copies from Nov. 15. They asked for the originals they requested, and were told to go to the warehouse the next day. They arrived earlier than scheduled, and saw county employees doing something with the originals. The employees pushed them out the door, but a check of the garbage revealed original tapes were thrown out. An employee actually tussled with them over the garbage bag, which tore open, and the employees called the local police to stop Blackboxvoting looking at the garbage. In short, a comparison of the originals they tried to hide and the copies they tried to give Blackboxvoting found a bunch of differences, all favoring Bush. The local newspaper, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, swallowed the story that the employees were just trying to dispose of copies. Right, they fought to stop someone seeing copies in the trash. Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe told the News-Journal Blackboxvoting didn't come to pick up the Nov. 15 copies. Then they got them how, and how did they know to go to the warehouse? The implication of course is that the tallies were faked after the election to give Bush more votes. Blackboxvoting wants to look at more Florida counties, and of course just a small amount of tampering with the touchscreen machines could account for the anomaly the Berkeley researchers found, so maybe Bush lost Florida again. We have to keep fighting to drag out the truth, because the push for this is coming from the grassroots. Not only the mainstream media, but the Democratic party is willing to accept the result and move on to soul searching.
Speaking of soul searching, it seems like the main reason Bush "won", if he did, is being ignored by, well, everybody. There was plenty of prognostication about the incumbent's approval ratings, the challenger's standing in the polls after the debates, even what a Washington Redskins victory at home would mean, but nothing about the main thing. I realized this while wondering if there was any statistical confirmation of my pet theory, that Bush "won" because voters felt they had to stick by the president in wartime, even if he as a complete screw up. Bush was an incumbent running during a war. This has happened a few times before. What happened those times? What do you know, the incumbent won every time. James Madison won in 1812, even though the War of 1812 had been an utter disaster up to that point. Abraham Lincoln won during the Civil War, despite the war being divisive within the Union. William McKinley won in 1900 despite the Spanish American War devolving into a counterinsurgency in the Phillippines which was unexpected and which had no end in sight. Perhaps 1916 and 1940 shouldn't be counted since we hadn't entered the world wars yet, but Franklin Roosevelt won in 1944. We were fighting in Vietnam in 1964, albeit not at the level we were about to, and Lyndon Johnson won easily. The war was definitely unpopular when Richard Nixon won easily in 1972. There are no examples of incumbent presidents losing in wartime. That's the history Kerry was fighting, and that's really what happened on election day when Bush got so many more votes than someone who failed at everything might expect. Ironically enough, the war in Iraq saved him. I always had this gut feeling that no matter how bad things got in Iraq, it didn't matter.
November 18
Maybe I was right in my concern that this year's Florida would be Florida. A study at UC Berkeley has found a statistical anomaly giving Bush an extra 130,000 - 260,000. The only variable that explains it is the use of touchscreen machines. Of course, without the paper trail that brother Jeb and the GOP fought so hard and successfully to stop, statistics are the only way to check the accuracy of the tallies. An alert reader probably spots a few things. One of those things is that this report gains credence from the reports of touchscreens changing Kerry votes to Bush. Another is that even 260,000 is less than the acting president's margin of 400,000. An even more alert reader will ask whether the pattern we saw in Ohio, Democratic precincts being particularly prone to long lines which stopped some unknown number of people from voting, also holds true in Florida. If so, then like in Ohio, we must ask whether this was deliberate. Even if this is the case, Florida ends up essentially a tie again. However, since over 39 million voters voted on touchscreens without paper trails, and there were stories from other states of votes being switched, maybe Bush didn't win the popular vote. There should be an investigation not only of the touchscreens, but of the long lines. If there was a widespread preponderance of long lines in Democratic precincts, then had everyone been able to vote, maybe Kerry would have won the popular vote. A key thing I urge upon readers is that time is short to actually affect changes, because just as the mainstream media have ignored the story and tried to pretend the election was on the up and up, Congress will investigate only with large public pressure, and even well meaning congressmen will get distracted with other matters. Contact your congressmen, and in some states contact your governor and secretary of state to make sure they know you're watching and demanding fair counts and full investigations.
Ian H. Solomon, Democratic poll watcher in Florida and associate dean at the Yale Law School, expresses grave doubts about the election results in Florida and elsewhere. He calls himself an unwitting accessory. While computer professionals have long been up in arms about electronic voting, he admits that most of the Democratic party didn't get it. They knew to watch for voter suppression at the polling places, but missed the tabulating. This is how easy these tabulating computers are to hack.
One Ohio precinct counted 2600 votes twice. Probably it was an accident, but given how close Ohio might be when the provisional ballots and unread punch cards are counted, such accidents might change the race. The Associated Press didn't say who was helped by the extra votes, but since every error found so far has benefitted Bush, Bush opponents can't help but hope there are more such discrepancies to be revealed. The article mentions a possible case of double voting, but it seems to be the exception that proves the rule. These cases are so rare, the odds of getting caught seem so high, that I can't believe this happens much. It's the counting that's the problem, not the voting. The article then mentions provisional ballots in Illinois not being counted. There's no hint of anything untoward, but it shows why provisional ballots should be replaced with same day registration. Voters whose registrations are in doubt aren't there to speak up for themselves, but registering at the polls lets them clear things up on the spot.
One of the criticisms of the Kerry campaign is that it failed to raise environmental issues more despite these being winning issues for Democrats. Robert M. Thorson of the Hartford Courant says we did raise the issue of deformed frogs in Minnesota, and that's part of why Kerry won. I didn't see environmental issues raised much here, but rather the DFL and progressive groups matched the GOP ground game. In fact, since this was the only ground game I saw, I've had difficulty understanding reports the GOP did so much better at it, but I guess this state was exceptional. No surprise, since GOTV was pioneered by Paul Wellstone, who beat a heavily favored incumbent senator (that senator, Rudy Boschwitz, was a class act when Wellstone died, forgiving the partisan speeches by grieving friends and family). I agree with the idea we need to make environmental issues bigger. They've got everything a liberal could want: the big guy sticking it to the little guy, problems people can see out their own windows, problems global in scope, demonstrated effectiveness of reforms, chances for involvement on every level from global to block club, and the common sense appeal of not trashing your own home.
November 17
I pointed out back when Porter Goss was nominated to run the CIA that he ran the House intelligence committee when it missed 911 and Iraq. So I'm not surprised he's screwing up the CIA now that he's in charge. Apparently being loyal to Bush is more important than getting the facts right. A purge of the people who got Iraq 100% wrong might make sense, but instead Goss is going after those who got it right, because his boss is the most blatant proponent of yes men since "yes" became the standard affirmative of the English language.
Deja vu all over again? And not just a Yogi Berra expression or John Fogerty song. There are reports that Iran has nuclear programs not previously revealed. The reports come from dissidents. Isn't believing dissidents who told the acting president what he wanted to hear how he got into the mess in Iraq? Surely they'll listen to skeptics this time. Oh wait, they purged the skeptics.
If only Condoleeza Rice's honesty was as strong as her qualifications. Remember this is the same woman who told the 911 commission that the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing was just a historical document. This is the one Bush must not have read that said Bin Laden planned to attack with airplanes. She also got caught in a lie parroting that line about 75% of Al Qaida leaders being captured or killed during an interview with Wolf Blitzer just last month. He asked how many leaders Al Qaida had, and she had no idea, but apparently they'd gotten 75% of an unknowable number. She has been lying the whole time Bush has been the acting president.
Sure, this stuff about the election being screwed over by unauditable machines is just conspiracy theory, like this article from one wacked out conspiracy site, Popular Science.
November 16
Election theft as a conspiracy theory has been raised some more in the mainstream media, with both praise and blame being thrown at blogs --- mostly blame from people who just don't want to take it seriously. On Hardball, Joe Trippi credited bloggers with showing that a lot of people are concerned about the honesty of the election and said the press and parties have a responsibility to investigate. Host Chris Matthews seemed not to share that opinion when he asked the Republican pundit, "Susan Molinari, this sounds like the Arabs in the West Bank who said that Yasser Arafat was assassinated by the Israelis. What do you make of it?" She replied with misinformation, saying even if all provisional ballots were counted, there weren't enough to overturn the margin of victory. Nobody corrected her, so I'll do it. There are 155,000 provisional ballots, and Bush's margin is 136,000. That's enough. She would have been correct to say not all will be approved, and not all will be for Kerry, so the likely scenario is Kerry gets closer. No one mentioned the uncounted punchcards, roughly 90,000, which are what makes a Kerry win still possible if we can get a fair recount. Considering the record of the guy in charge, a fair recount is not a safe assumption.
Molinari did manage to get in an instance of the false charge method of election fraud. She said, "Joe, come with me to New York City someday and I'll take to you some areas of New York where we're quite clear that there have always been problems and irregularities." She didn't elaborate, so I went looking. I couldn't find any hurting Republicans. This one hurt voters in heavily Democratic New York City. I found a list of more problems in New York, and again, and this is a common thread in every state where problems have cropped up, all of them hurt Democrats. At least they don't use touchscreens, so recounts are possible and happening. And hey, what a surprise, but once again in a state with election problems, both the governor and secretary of state are Republicans.
On MPR's Midday, the topic was election problems, and there were three guests. None of them take the claims of election fraud seriously (scroll to "Online skepticism of the 2004 election"). None of them addressed the causes of suspicion, and they managed to keep agreeing with each other. Surprisingly for MPR, they had a whole program to address allegations of wrongdoing without a single person to put the case supposedly being debunked. The mainstream media, alert persons will recall, dismissed claims we were being lied to about Iraq before the invasion. We opponents turned out to be 100% right that the evidence didn't hold up. Don't be so quick to dismiss us this time.
Changing to a lie about a different election, would you believe the public wasn't told the whole truth about Afghanistan? There were reports of problems with the Afghan elections at the time, but the press seemed to once again swallow the acting president's line. This time they believed the elections had mostly gone well. Journalist Christian Parenti covered the elections for The Nation magazine, and appeared on the latest Now with Bill Moyers. He revealed problems across the line. He did however think Hamid Karzai would have won anyway, being about the only national figure. Afghanistan is stuck, trying a first election in chaotic circumstances. What's our reason for accepting "he would have won anyway" as an excuse for our sorry presidential election?
See the archives for earlier entries.
